Can a Home Inspection Improve Your Chances of a Sale?

10/06/2013 14:25 BST
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Updated
24/03/2014 12:59 GMT

Selling a home in the current climate is difficult, and you need more than just a 60 minute makeover and a good estate agent to show it off to guarantee yourself a sale. Sometimes you need an extra hand to get the people who come through your door to make an offer and then go through with the sale.

The housing market is seeing an improvement for the first time since 2010, with the numbers of first-time buyers and home movers the highest it's been for over three years, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors report last month. The reason for this has been attributed to the Funding for Lending scheme, which has seen cheaper mortgages being made available. Good news for estate agents.

Of course, a slight rise is nothing to get too carried away with, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. Homeowners need all the good news they can get when the rest of the news is about recession, job loses, business closures and government cuts. In the UK, the average home will be priced at £227,000 next year (according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research), with a rise of £50,000 expected in the next five years.

Most people reading this and hoping to get on the property ladder any time soon might be wondering where on earth their deposit - or any chance of being able to pay off their mortgage - is going to come from. The same goes for home movers who will be looking to sell. Who is going to be able to afford to purchase their home?

The Chancellor George Osborne has introduced a new Help to Buy scheme to work alongside the New Buy scheme, which will help people looking to buy a home take shared equity loans of up to 20% of the value of a new build, meaning that home movers and first-time buyers will be able to get an interest-free loan and beef their deposit up. Putting up 5% will enable you to borrow 20% to get to the 25% deposit level, meaning lower monthly payments. A huge help to homeowners.

Now that there is a little bit of hope on the horizon, home movers can feel a little more confident that they can sell their homes. But as mentioned previously, it takes more than a few showarounds to convince people to part with their cash and to buy a home. More now than ever, home buyers are feeling the need to be 100% assured that it is a good investment, for exactly the reasons we've covered already. It needs to make perfect financial sense or they are at the risk of losing more than just money.

Home inspectors are extremely popular with homeowners who are looking to sell. Different from building or code inspectors, home inspectors go through each section of your home to ensure that any defects are brought to your attention that could hurt the sale of your property. They check the core structure and foundations of the home, the electrical wiring, and the interior structures - including walls, door frames and the attic and cellar of your home - and areas outside the property too, such as the roof, walls and your garage.

Having your home checked and signed off as a pass from a quality inspector could be a huge selling point for you when agents are showing people around your home. Buyers need reassurance, and a home inspection could be the icing on the cake that sells your home. There are companies such as Homeinspectors.net that create a directory of home inspectors, so they are not too difficult to find online. There should be quality agents nearby to your home, and they could be the difference between you selling your home and it not selling because of issues being found after the potential buyer takes out a survey of their own on your home.